The Thomas Moran Trust Celebrates a $525,000 Matching Grant from Federal Preservation Program
East Hampton, February 9, 2009. The importance of the Thomas Moran house, studio and garden, located on Main Street in East Hampton, has been recognized with the award of a $525,000 matching grant from the Save America’s Treasures program of the United States government. The recipient of the grant, the Thomas Moran Trust (www.thomasmorantrust.org), is an independent not for profit organization that will restore and preserve the East Hampton property and develop related cultural and art-oriented activities.
One of the largest and most successful grant programs for the protection of the nation’s endangered and irreplaceable cultural heritage, Save America’s Treasures (www.nps.gov/history/hps/treasures/index.htm) helps fund preservation and conservation work on nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts as well as historic structures and sites. The Moran property qualifies on several counts. It is a designated National Historic Landmark, a structure of national architectural significance. It is the place where Thomas Moran painted some of his most important works during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making it a significant part of the nation’s artistic heritage. And as the first artist’s studio on eastern Long Island, it launched the colorful artistic history of that area.
The President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities and the National Park Service announced the grant in mid-December, one of forty awarded from a field of 221 applicants, as part of a competitive matching grant program administered in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Dr. Peter M. Wolf, chairman of the Thomas Moran Trust, commented, “The Trust is honored by this recognition of its work over the past three years, and by having important cultural, conservation and preservation agencies of the national government support this effort. We are dedicated to preserving and reawakening a long neglected site so very important to America’s cultural and artistic heritage.”
The Thomas Moran Trust also announced in January 2009 that it has chosen the prominent firm of Stephen Tilly, Architect (http://www.stillyarchitect.com) to plan the restoration of the house. Tilly was chosen from a field of four finalists by the trust’s Architectural Selection Committee, which included Pulitzer Prize winning architectural critic and historian Paul Goldberger, and the noted architect Jacquelin Robertson of Cooper Robertson & Partners (both residents of East Hampton).
Since acquiring title to the property from East Hampton’s Guild Hall in October 2008, the Thomas Moran Trust has completed emergency repairs and necessary measures for longer term stabilization, most importantly shoring up parts of the exterior that were in danger of further deterioration and possible collapse. With the house secured against further damage, and with certain elements of the house now opened up and accessible for technical studies, the architect, engineers and historians can complete their work.
In 1884 Thomas Moran and his wife Mary Nimmo Moran became the first artists to build a house with a working studio in the Hamptons. Up until that time artists stayed mostly in boarding houses along Main Street and worked outdoors or in found spaces. Their pioneering efforts—in architecture and lifestyle—galvanized into a romantic tradition that is still with us. With cultivated tastes, virtuoso talent and a bohemian outlook, the Morans built a house opposite East Hampton’s. Town Pond that was mannered, playful and an original, unpredictable spin on the newly popular Queen Anne style.
The studio was an enchanting gathering place for fellow aesthetes as well as the sixteen painters, printmakers and illustrators who belonged to the talented Moran family. There were musical evenings, poetry readings, evenings of Scottish folksongs as well as tableaux vivant in period costumes—and they occasionally glided across Hook Pond on a Venetian gondola.
Mary died of typhoid fever in the 1899 epidemic spread from Cuba by the Rough Riders who were billeted at Montauk during the Spanish-American War. Daughter Ruth Moran inherited the house after her father’s death in 1926, and in 1947 sold it to Elizabeth and Condi Lamb, for whom it functioned as both home and, in an added wing, real estate office. The Lamb family donated the property to Guild Hall, who in turn deeded it to the Thomas Moran Trust, a separate group formed specifically to restore the house and grounds and plan for its future use.
Because of his panoramic works of the American West, Moran is memorable in the natural history as well as the art history of this nation. “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone”—among his most famous works—once hung in the United States Capital and now is housed in the Smithsonian.
Reflecting the importance of the Moran legacy, the monumental Thomas Moran landscape, “Green River of Wyoming” sold at Christie’s in May of 2008 for $17.73 million, well above the pre-auction estimate of $3.5 to $5 million, and double the price of a John Singer Sargent that previously held the record for a 19th century American painting.
With the Save America’s Treasures grant and with funds already pledged, the Thomas Moran Trust is well on its way to raising the money required to indeed save this American treasure.
The Thomas Moran Trust, 101 Main Street, P.O. Box 1234, East Hampton NY 11937
631 324- 0100